It is proposed to make an analysis of decision making in medicine from a Jewish legal ethical perspective which emerges from a corpus of law and a system of jurisprudence that evolved over 2000 years. This perspective incorporates a methodology for deriving definitions and laws of conduct from its coherent basic value system to make it applicable to circumstances not previously encountered. Explicating the hierarchy of values that implicitly determines specific rulings related to medical practices as recorded in the Responsa literature can serve as a procedural model for how to derive ethical standards on specific cases from general governing principles. The usefulness of this model lies in its heuristic method of teaching ethical procedures for decision making and in generating ethical guidelines for policy formulation in the medical setting.